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Road Trip Musings: A Hapless American Returns Home

Gordon Duff Salem-News.com

Gordon Duff's view from the other side.

Photos courtesy: Gordon Duff

(CINCINNATI, Ohio) - Fewer Americans travel anymore, mostly because they are flat broke. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the airlines are at war with their employees, passengers too. Planes are filthy and food inedible. Still, I would have Americans travel to Europe, at first anyway. Millions of Americans served in the military in Europe and many are there still. We left our stamp there, signs of Americanized culture everywhere. Everywhere, except in the endless thousands of pay toilets across Germany. When are they going to get a grip over there?

There are some clear differences in Europe that make travel worthwhile. Maybe the best thing was the perfect brat(wurst) I had in Trier a couple of days ago. Trier is a German town near the Luxembourg border. It is right off the Mosel, a hundred miles of castles and wineries, and has a rich history, a German town filled with Roman ruins.

Bernkastel

I usually spend Christmas in Germany. With kids grown up, it is like stepping into the past, more like the childhood I remember from the 50s. Germans know Christmas. Even the smallest towns have nightly Christmas Markets and month long celebrations. The cities, like Nuremberg, Berlin or Munich party from November 17 onward. It is Germany but it feels uniquely American, not the place we live now, the video game and shopping mall America but like something, maybe a real memory, I am not sure. but something we had lost somewhere.

Early on I will voice a dangerous opinion. There is no reason for there to be an EU as it exists. Canada and the US along with Germany, the UK, France, Italy, the Netherlands and other EU members should probably share a currency and a common political leadership. Germany is more “mainstream America” than half our states. The world has changed. Its more than that, though. Going our separate ways has led to failure.

Last week, the Euro collapsed. I saw it coming. The Euro used to be 67 cents. Then it became 1.67. It still spent like a quarter and bought nothing. It was and is an empty paper currency filled with hot air. Americans should know all about that. We call them “debt based currencies” and they are a bad thing. Explaining that here would make you go away. I will stop.

Calais, France

I believe America and even Europe would have alot to gain from giving up our failed attempts at autonomy. With all our TV and nuclear weapons, America is a failure, enslaved in war, economically screwed and kicked to death by financial scamsters. Europe is much the same way, some ways better, some ways worse. We need to balance out things, America has become too crazy to live and is, thusly, dying. We are watching it and know it.

Few Americans know about France, other than it has several cities with large Islamic populations, much like Detroit or Los Angeles. France is cool. Any American could move into any French village, knowing nothing of the language and culture and feel more at home there than in the US in a week. French all hate their government, hate every religion and will tell you about it at the drop of a hat. I love that. Mind you, they still elect total idiots, just like we do but they hate them even quicker. It takes us a week, they do it in minutes.

I spent a week driving around the UK, staying at RAF Croughton and RAF Fairford, two bases with Air Force Lodges. I take this opportunity to thank the US Air Force for their gracious hospitality.

Along with the hundreds of miles of “wrong side of the road” driving, looking for obscure historical sites to take pictures of, as I am in the UK pretty often, I also spent a day with one of my friends from college. This is a well known historian, so I will leave off the name. He gets enough credit already.

Cirenchester, UK

This is someone I had not seen in many years, born in Pakistan with a PhD from an American university but a Brit for decades. He and his wife drove out to Fairford, a beautiful town in the Cotswolds about 30 miles from Oxford. My wife and I followed them back and weaved through the traffic jams and tiny streets of Oxford, parking in front of their home directly adjacent to one of the 38 colleges that make up the university there.

Lunch was at “The Trout,” a pub on the Thames River featured in the Inspector Morse TV series with John Thaw. I am a big John Thaw fan. I recommend the place, and will have to put that in TripAdvisor. Good food in Britain is not so easy to find, unless you find a “chip shop” with a line out the door.

Much of the afternoon was spent walking around Oxford, in and out of places they would never let me into otherwise. It is a college but also more, you can smell the money a mile away. Its an odd combination of real students and “Bush at Yale” types, if you get my meaning.

London

Family was brought in from across Britain to see the crazed college roommate and infamous “defense journalist.” Britain has a huge population of immigrants, Pakistan, India and any other former British possession. Frankly, though many have lived in Britain all their lives, America treats illegal aliens better. I am here with what would normally be the highest strata of British society short of peerage, a family of well educated, extremely successful people who are totally British, even a bit “posh” and we begin to talk.”

“They hate us here.” This was my friend’s wife, a bit of a force of nature and in no way what any American would imagine of an Islamic woman. There was never any bitterness but clearly disappointment. I had been told earlier about airport problems coming in and out of the United States for conferences. This is a well know academic, one of the most published experts on security issues in the world, frankly someone whose work is and has been vital to American policymakers for some time and he can’t get in and out of the country he was educated in.

I thought to myself, “Perhaps if you could get on a “no fly list” you could pop in and out of America easily like the terrorists do.”

OK, I actually said it, probably half a dozen times. “Faisal the Fizzler” flew back and forth from the US to Pakistan 16 times without a seconds difficulty. I have a Pakistani visa in my passport, tucked in next to my DOD identification and get questioned every time I get near an airport. What a nation of liars we are!

Whenever I think of the “dancing Israelis” with their cameras set up, waiting to film planes crashing into the twin towers, then cavorting around the streets, “high five’ing” each other, only to be arrested, released and flown back to Israel on a special flight under the personal orders of the President of the United States….

Anger

Mosel at Neumagen

Like we don’t all know how terrorists get in and out and who does it. It took less than a day to debunk the “crotch bomber.” They killed that investigation immediately as soon as it got hung around the neck of “that special country.”

We are still arresting Pakistanis though the “Time Square Fizzler” is being tied to a CIA/Mossad/India operation in the FATA region of Pakistan. Embarrassed members of Pakistan’s security services have been leaking the evidence on the internet. Ah, but I digress. …

Frankly, I believe 95% of the terrorist news we hear is manure, but hell, what would I know. I wonder how news hacks for the phony press can live with themselves.

I am supposed to be driving around taking photos of churchyards and castles. Last summer I drove up to Hadrian’s Wall and then into Scotland. I recommend this to anyone although 8 buck a gallon gas is painful and nothing is cheap up there. The Duff (MacDuff) part of the family is from there, all cattle thieves, smugglers and buggers I am told, 1100 years of family history, all bad.

What we all lose is our commonality, the things that make us all human, all the same. When I think about it, and I travel everywhere around the world, the only “bad people” I run into are on TV shows.

Riesling, Germany, Mosel

Every crazed murdering Vietnam veteran, every murderous Islamic terrorist, every “welfare Cadillac” fraudster is a TV character, someone I have been conditioned to hate based on, what I now know to be the political needs of people who hate me, hate America and wish we were all dead.

If only I were overstating what I have learned…

Today we have kids, tourists in uniform with guns, sitting down with people in Afghanistan. They could just as easily be shooting at each other or drinking tea. The difference is face to face contact and human respect.

What does this mean? Simple. It means that all wars are economic games started by banksters and their puppet governments, yes Mr. Obama, useless wastes of lives and human energy that accomplish nothing except the destruction of everyone they touch, everyone except for the rich. All wars are class wars, wars are held by the powerful who watch the poor suffer and die while they rake in money. Think Smedley Butler.

I am almost ready to say that World War 2 could be prevented. As we declassify documents and the truth leaks out, the myth of the war begins to fall apart. A hundred million people may have died and much of the insanity that started the war wasn’t just Germany and Japan. I have some personal prejudice. I spend alot of time in Germany. It is hard to imagine fighting them. I think of the people I drink beer with, play with and try to picture them as we are told. It seems impossible.

Smedley Butler USMC

Then I think of rendition and Gitmo and see Americans doing exactly the same things. Then I think of Gaza. Nobody is immune from the disease it seems.

So, do we stick ourselves together in one big country? Which countries do we let in? We have to leave Greece out, of course. They are a financial nightmare and they don’t even have a Federal Reserve to sell them their money at interest, interest paid to “foreign” banks. Actually, when I compare them, they seem like financial geniuses compared to us. They owe next to nothing.

Here’s a way to look at things. Picture all the people that TV tells you to hate. We aren’t going to discuss who runs TV, you can guess where that will go. Now picture their children. See a child 5 years old, you know, like one in the photos you always see dead somewhere, Gaza, Afghanistan, Mexico, Rwanda, Iraq or wherever. Tell that child you want them to die because they are evil. Explain to them that you hate them because you saw a story on TV that showed people like he would grow up to be acting badly.

Of course, the TV story was written, produced and directed by drugged out moral degenerates you would never allow within a hundred feet of your own kids, much less your pets, but we let “these people” decide how we think.

Picture how TV tells you to think and feel and tell me if you could have been a guard at Auschwitz. Be honest now.

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Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran and a regular contributor to Veterans Today. He specializes in political and social issues. You can see a large collection of Gordon's published articles at this link: VeteransToday.com.

He is an outspoken advocate for veterans and his powerful words have brought about change. Gordon is a lifelong PTSD sufferer from his war experiences and he is empathetic to the plight of today's veterans also suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. We greatly appreciate the opportunity to feature Gordon's timely and critical reports on Salem-News.com, a news organization staffed by a number of veterans, particularly former U.S. Marines.